English

Parametrized Path Approach to Vacuum Decay

Quantum Physics 2020-03-04 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We develop a new real-time approach to vacuum decay based on a reduction to a finite number of degrees of freedom. The dynamics is followed by solving a generalized Schr\"odinger equation. We first apply this method to a real scalar field in Minkowski space and compare the decay rate with that obtained by the instanton approach. The main difference is in the early-time dynamics, where the decay is faster due to the tail of the wave function. We then apply it to a cold atom model recently proposed to simulate vacuum decay experimentally. This approach will be extended to include gravity in a future work.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.12765,
  title  = {Parametrized Path Approach to Vacuum Decay},
  author = {Florent Michel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.12765},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

19 pages, 13 figures, close to the version accepted for publication in PRD

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:30:14.723Z